Charting The Top Five Climate Data Sets Using ggplot2

2018/11/16

What is this post about?

The urgent need to address climate change implies that we should all act to communicate and confront this existential risk. However, the enormous amount of climate data can be daunting for non-experts such as myself to navigate. What data should we be looking at? Where can I find them? In 2008 Professor Stefan Rahmstorf presented what he considered The 5 Most Important Data Sets of Climate Science. Recently I came across a post on the Open Mind blog where the author updated these data sets through the present and examined their evolution since 2008. However, it wasn’t immediately clear where to find this data and track it over time.

The post sparked the idea of reproducing these five charts in R, using ggplot2 to create crisp graphs, and make the source of the data and process fully reproducible. This could make it easier for others to also share this data. The code to generate each of these five important charts is below. I rely on basic tidyverse libraries as well as the patchwork package to generate the mosaic chart at the end. I plan to periodically update these charts to keep them up to date, and add additional data sets and graphs over time. I hope you find this useful and welcome your comments.